Summary 

China’s Ministry of Education has announced plans to launch an international online teaching platform, delivering English-medium courses delivered by Chinese HEIs. The platform will be aimed at overseas rather than Chinese students.

The platform is still under development but two local MOOC platforms – iCourse (https://www.icourse.cn) and Xuetang X (www.xuetangx.com) – have been selected as the first two sites to provide these programmes.

The MoE also plans to expand the country’s online education internationalisation by hosting a world conference on MOOCs in Beijing this year and by supporting the establishment of a global MOOC alliance between Chinese and overseas universities.

Analysis by Kevin Prest, Senior Analyst, British Council International Education Services

Online education has become increasingly visible due to the current COVID-19 epidemic, and the Ministry of Education feels that China has advantages in this area. As of April 3^rd, 1,454 of China’s 2,688 HEIs were delivering more than 940,000 different courses online, with an accumulated total of 1.18 billion lesson attendances.

Improving China’s position as an international education destination has been a priority in the country’s education policies for some time, and this is an area where Chinese institutions have been keen to share their expertise internationally. For example, Tsinghua University organised a “cloud sharing” online conference to share their online teaching experience with overseas universities, while the Heilongjiang provincial education department have recently provided support to their counterparts in Sakha in eastern Russia on online education management.

Source

China Daily – China to offer global students online courses in English: http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202004/10/WS5e90748da3105d50a3d15685.html

Xinhua – Chinese universities will provide online courses for students all over the world:

http://www.xinhuanet.com/2020-04/10/c_1125839976.htm (in Chinese)